In the Israeli election, set for April 9th, the polls show Benny Gantz is still leading, but Bibi Netanyahu is still the favorite to become the next Prime Minister. And why is that? Unless Gantz wakes up and shakes up the campaign, his Blue & While Party may win a couple of seats more than Likud, but he will not be able to forge a 61-seat majority in the 120-member Knesset.

It was a long time coming, but it still hit the Jewish state like a bombshell. Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit has finally presented a 45-page indictment that would charge Prime Minister Netanyahu with three separate charges of bribery and breach of trust. These are grave offenses that could lead to a prison sentence. However, it's a long way from over - Israeli law entitles public officials to a pre-trial hearing before the Attorney General serves the indictment. (This is to prevent innocent public officials from being dragged into court by political rivals or wacky citizens.)

Kibbutz Hanita was founded in 1938 on a land purchased by David Ben-Gurion, then head of the Jewish Agency For Palestine. IsraCast presents the original letter sent by Moshe Shertok of the Jewish Agency to the Lebanese Prime Minister Al-Adhab and his reply letter.

The Ma'ale Akrabim massacre was an attack on an Israeli civilian passenger bus, carried out the night of 16-17 March 1954. Eleven passengers were shot dead by the attackers who ambushed and boarded the bus. Four passengers survived, 2 of whom had been injured by the gunmen.

March 11, 1948 - A car filled with explosives blew up in the courtyard of the Jewish Agency building in Jerusalem. 12 people were killed, among them Arie Leib Jaffe, one of the founders of the Zionist movement.

On the anniversary of the death of Israels former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, IsraCast brings you a reocrding of Egyptian President Sadat's and Israeli Prime Minister Begin's speech from the signing of the Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt in Washington on 1979.

Purim is right around the corner here in Israel; and while it is not one of the Seven Biblical Feasts that Jews are commanded to observe, like Chanukah, it has become a staple of the Jewish tradition, and in Israel is celebrated somewhat like a national holiday; and a very colorful one at that.

In March 1921, twenty six years before the The United Nations General Assembly voted to partition Palestine, Mr. Winston Churchill visited Palestine and met a delegation of Muslim leaders. They protested that the ultimate objective of political Zionism was to give the natural resources of Palestine to the Jews. They pointed out that the Arabs had occupied Palestine for over a thousand years. They asked Churchill to use his influence to correct what they considered a great injustice.

Levi Eshkol (Skolnik) Born on October 25th 1895, Served as the third Prime Minister of Israel from 1963 until his death from a heart attack in 1969. He was the first Israeli Prime Minister to die in office.

The MV Struma was a ship chartered in World War II to carry Jewish refugees from Axis-allied Romania to Palestine. Built in 1867, the MV Struma began as a small luxury steam yacht. She ended, however, 75 years later, as a ship for hauling livestock that became the grave of hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing from Romania.

'Ben-Yehuda Street incident' - IsraCast is publishing photos of the British car bombings in Jerusalem before the end of the mandate in 1948. 50 Jews were killed, with more than 100 injured. The photos were taken by the well known photographer David Rubinger.

The 'Tehran Children' was a group of about one thousand Jewish children, most of them orphans, who reached Palestine through Iran in February 1943. IsraCast brings you a sequence of photos which show the 'Tehran Children' arriving in Israel.

And how could it be otherwise? Consider the recent, horrific terror attack. Ori Ansbacher, a 19-year-old Israel woman, was walking in the outskirts of Jerusalem when she was attacked, raped, and stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist from the West Bank. The DNA of 29-year-old Arafat Arfiya was found at the site, leading to his arrest within 48 hours. Police say he has confessed and reenacted the crime.

Abdullah II bin al-Hussein is the current King of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. He ascended the throne on 7 February 1999 after the death of his father King Hussein. King Abdullah is a member of the Hashemite family and is reportedly a 43rd-generation direct descendant of Prophet Muhammad.

The Technion - Israel Institute of Technology is an institute of higher education in Haifa. Founded in 1924, the Technion began with an emphasis on the natural sciences, engineering, and architecture, but has since also became one of the top medical schools in the world.

In a newly published study in Scientific Reports, a team from Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute for Drug Research reports its discovery of 27 new molecules that activate a protein called PPAR-delta, which has the potential to increase physical endurance and trim waistlines by getting muscle cells to burn more fat. These molecules therefore hold promise for the treatment of fatty liver disease and obesity, among other ailments.

Op-ed: In light of the fast changing situation on the borders, Israel should have a channel of dialogue with Hezbollah in order to convey calming messages – including quiet non-aggression agreements.

While the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra organization is taking over almost all the territory facing our Golan Heights, and the Islamic State is breaking into Lebanese territory from the north – and after it declared last week that it was "launching the war to liberate the Lebanon region and add it to the Islamic State" – the last thing Hezbollah needs right now is a conflict with Israel.

Its two existential enemies, Sunni organizations al-Qaeda and Islamic State, are outflanking it from the east and from the south, and it is deeply engaged in that area. The definers of the Middle East have changed, and they are no longer Arabs against Israel, but Sunnis against Shiites.

Remember the name - Benny Gantz. A former IDF Chief of Staff, Gantz has just rocked the current Israeli election campaign - voters go to the polls on April 9th. What's happened? For weeks Gantz, a soft-spoken former paratroop commander, standing 6'5 tall, ran a low key campaign. He barely spoke at all, for which he was lambasted by the media and by his political rivals, in particular, by Bibi's Likud supporters. Then, on the night of January 29th, Gantz took off the wraps at his party convention. The whole country was waiting to hear what Israel's "Forest Gump" had to say finally. It turned out to be a blockbuster! Speaking quietly to his enthralled supporters and the nation, Gantz hauled Netanyahu over the coals. He compared Bibi's administration to that of the corrupt French Monarch Louis XIV - "The state? I am the State!". Bibi, now facing four investigations and possible indictment, had veered from the "straight and narrow" and the country was paying the price.

Ten years ago, Dr. Michael Har-Noy, founder and CEO of a Jerusalem-based startup developing an immunotherapy treatment that could potentially cure cancer, lamented that the fight against the dreaded disease “is a battle we are losing.” Today, Har-Noy’s company is getting closer to turning the tide. In the past decade, Immunovative Therapies has conducted dozens of clinical trials, opened branches in California, Arizona and Thailand, and raised $35 million. But the biggest boost came from the publicity surrounding immunotherapy pioneer Jim Allison, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Avraham Ravitz, an influential ultra-Orthodox Jewish lawmaker who served in Israel's parliament for 20 years, died Monday in Jerusalem. The 75-year-old Ravitz suffered from a heart condition and had been hospitalized since early January.

The matriculation rate across Israel’s Druze sector rose from 52% to 73% since Yeholot introduced an accelerated learning program for underachievers.

“A” is a physically disabled Druze youth who had failed 11 subjects by the end of junior high school. He lacked both motivation and self-esteem, and his teachers and parents had all but given up on him. Thanks to an innovative educational program implemented in A’s high school, he graduated with a high-honors matriculation certificate and plans to enter the prestigious Technion-Israel Institute of Technology after two years of voluntary national service as a tutor in his former high school, where he is now seen as a role model.

Is it now Iran's call? For the first time, Iranian forces in Syria have attacked Israel by launching a missile at a target inside of Israeli territory - the winter resort at Mt. Hermon. Fortunately, for the thousands of Israelis in the area, and indeed even for the Iranian personnel stationed in Syria, Israel's Iron Dome Defense intercepted and shot down the Iranian missile. For, if it had landed and killed Israelis, it would have triggered a full-blown war with the Iranian forces in Syria.

What to make of it? The US Commander in Chief has just countermanded his previous order to withdraw the remaining two thousand troops from northeastern Syria within a month or so. This after previously informing Turkish dictator Erdogan in a casual telephone conversation. However, after consulting his top foreign policy advisor, John Bolton, Trump has put the kaibosh on Erdogan's plan to clobber the Kurds, maybe once and for all.

‘If we understand exactly how the circuitry that we’ve discovered controls anxiety, this may help develop new drugs to alleviate its symptoms.’

Israeli researchers recently made a discovery that could help develop new therapies for anxiety disorders. With up to one in three people around the world at the risk of experiencing severe anxiety, this is big news. At the heart of the discovery, published in Cell Reports, is a previously unknown biochemical pathway underlying anxiety.

Within the framework of the Paris Peace Conference, a political accord was signed on January 3, 1919, by Dr. Chaim Weizmann in the name of the Zionist Organization and by the Emir Feisal, son of the Sherif of Mecca.

David Ben Gurion: 'Any 18 year-old Yeshiva Student Who Breaks the Law Should Be Immediately Recruited Into IDF'

'Rioting Of Religious Fanatics Exceeds All Limits & I Bear Responsibility Because I Exempted Them From IDF Service'

'Whole Question Of Yeshiva Students Army Exemption Should Be Examined'
The lawlessness of some charedim ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel is not new. Over forty-eight years ago former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion sent a letter to the incumbent Levi Eshkol with proposals for coping with the lawlessness of some yeshiva students. In presenting a translation of that letter, analyst David Essing is of the view that it applies no less today, perhaps even more, than it did then.
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The Armenian genocide refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction (genocide) of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was implemented through wholesale massacres and deportations, with the deportations consisting of forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees. The total number of resulting Armenian deaths is generally held to have been between one and one and a half million.

Is Turkey planning a massacre of Kurdish rebels in the wake of US President Donald Tump's surprise decision to withdraw the remaining two-thousand American troops from Syria? Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not hiding his intention to punish the Kurds once and for all for their territorial games and drive for independence during the campaign in Syria against ISIS. For years, Turkey and the Kurds have been engaged in a brutal struggle over the Kurds' historic desire to establish an independent state. The Kurds, estimated to number some 30 million, live in a region known broadly as Kurdistan which is a contiguous spread over four separate states - Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. How come this landlocked area with such a large indigenous population was simply left out of the New Middle East that was carved out by Britain and France during WWI?